Recovery Is Cultural
A perspective of the wellness industry through the traditions of Black communal care, leisure, and recovery.
There is a version of wellness that has become so expensive.
It lives behind minimalist branding and clean typography. It smells of eucalyptus and asks you to download another app, buy another supplement, book another retreat, optimize another morning routine. Every few months it reinvents itself with a new language, promising that this time, finally, your nervous system will exhale.
It is an industry built on the assumption that recovery is something you purchase. I've fallen prey to it, and in some ways never fully bought into it.
That’s not meant to take away from restorative massages or because a beautiful spa can't offer something meaningful. I love thoughtful hotels and a good Swedish massage. I also notice lighting, furniture, and moody floral arrangements in the lobby. I have spent enough time studying hospitality to know that environments matter. They shape our breathing before they ever shape our thoughts.
But every time I hear someone describe recovery as if it were a luxury product waiting to be unlocked, I think about the women who taught me otherwise. None of them called themselves wellness experts. They just knew how to keep one another alive.
Long before wellness influencers began talking about co-regulation, Black communities had already built entire cultures around it. We just called it coming over.
Certain things get erased when an industry discovers something a community has practiced for generations.
First, the language changes: Care becomes self-care. Community becomes gathering.
Tradition becomes ritual. Home becomes sanctuary. Then, almost without noticing, the emphasis shifts.
What once belonged to all of us becomes something individuals are expected to perfect on their own. Recovery ends up being another responsibility, internalized as another personal failure if you aren't doing it correctly.
What a strange burden to place on women who have spent their entire lives carrying other people's expectations. I’m specifically talking about Black women. Black queer women. We are constantly taught to think about recovery as something that happens after we've earned it.
Finish the project. Win the tournament. Take care of everyone else. Survive the job. Make it through the season. Then maybe— if there is enough money left, enough vacation time, enough emotional bandwidth—you can finally rest.
Even with all of this, there are woman who refuse to ask for permission. They built recovery into ordinary life because ordinary life demanded it.
Someone always knew whose house to stop by. Someone always had extra food. Someone noticed when you had become quieter than usual.
Someone insisted you sit down before explaining yourself.
That wasn't accidental. That was innate.
The wellness industry often imagines recovery as solitude. There is beauty in solitude; I seek it often. Some of my clearest thinking happens while walking a golf course alone or sitting quietly in a hotel room with my journal.
Solitude also sounds like your aunt laughing so hard and slapping the table.
Sometimes it sounds like old R&B drifting out of a kitchen while somebody washes dishes and nobody is in a hurry to leave. Other times it sounds like your friend saying, "Girl, come over" without asking whether you've earned the invitation. There are wounds that only the quiet can reach and ones only community knows how to touch.
Black people have always understood something this country rarely acknowledges: leisure is not laziness. It is evidence that life contains something beyond survival.
Sunday dinners. Spades. Fishing. Gardening. Golf. Cookouts. Beauty salons. Front porches. Family reunions. Music that refused urgency. Recovery did not have to be another individual responsibility. Sometimes restoration meant being around people who knew you well enough to let you rest. That feels profoundly different from a wellness culture increasingly asking each of us to become better managers of our own exhaustion.
I think this is why I keep returning to golf.
People assume I study the sport. I do, but I am more interested in what happens around it.
Eventually, the score disappears. What remains is how the place made your body feel. Whether you could linger. Who you became while you were there. Who waited for you afterward.
That has become the center of my practice. Recovery is part of what keeps performance from consuming the rest of our lives.
This is what pisses me off about so much of the wellness conversation. It can mistake consumption for care.
Don’t get it twisted. I will book the massage. I care deeply about beautiful rooms.
But no serum has ever made me feel known. No luxury hotel has replaced my chosen family. No breathing exercise has matched the relief of being with someone who already knows the story; whose presence causes your nervous system to chill out on sight.
The body keeps different kinds of score. Some are biological. Others are relational.
Who makes you exhale? Where you do not have to explain yourself? Which rooms let you arrive without deciding who you need to be inside them?
Those are recovery metrics, too.
None of this is an argument against beauty.
Beautiful rooms matter. Good architecture matters. Soft lighting, fresh flowers, natural materials—the details change how we experience a place. I have built much of my personal home and work around that belief.
I also believe beauty is most powerful when it remembers what it is serving. A beautifully designed room without the buzz of connection is still just a room. I want to know who taught us to recover in the first place. For me, it’s the Black women who know care requires tables large enough for everyone, enough food to send people home with leftovers, conversations allowed to wander, and communities where no woman was expected to carry the full weight of her life alone.
My sister. My best friend. My niece and goddaughter. My therapist. My doctor.
That knowledge deserves more than nostalgia. It deserves recognition.
Because if recovery is something we inherited long before anyone learned how to sell it to us, perhaps the future of wellness is about inventing something new and remembering what we already knew.
Come in. We've been expecting you.
